“Washington’s U Street: A Biography” reception Thursday, March 24th @ National Trust For Historic Preservation
Blair Ruble, author of Washington’s U Street: A Biography, will be at the National Trust For Historic Preservation (1785 Massachusetts. Avenue, NW – Dupont Circle Metro) on Thursday, March 24th for a 5:00 p.m. reception and book Signing and 6:00 p.m. reading.
R.S.V.P. here or at 410.516.7943.
“U Street Biography Examines History of City’s Famous ‘Contact Zone’”
On May 1, 1991 the U Street metro station opened. In the ensuing two decades the corridor extending eastward from 16th Street to Florida Avenue has physically healed from the deep scars of the 1968 riots, but a longstanding and discernible anxiety is still palpable as U Street’s transformation continues.
Blair A. Ruble’s Washington’s U Street: A Biography (Johns Hopkins University Press / Woodrow Wilson Center Press) arrives at an apt time when U Street and the greater city’s historical and cultural integrity is being closely examined in the context of development and neighborhood change, known as the omnipresent encroachment of gentrification. Ruble’s book, with exhaustive detail, goes where some seem afraid to go at times — U Street’s vibrant past.
Previously known for writing about Russia’s urban history, Ruble says, “This book was different, because on the one hand, interest in Washington is greater than in Russia these days yet, oddly enough, the cannon of letters around the city is more scattered and less developed. I found myself having to develop an image of the field of DC history in order to relate my work to it rather than adding a new work to a well developed field.”
Complete with personal profiles of past and present DC luminaries, known locally and nationally, in more than 300 pages of text and historical and contemporary photographs, Ruble takes the reader on a journey of U Street’s history from its initial development following the arrival of runaway slaves to the city during the Civil War to President Obama’s visit to the landmark Ben’s Chili Bowl.
Sifting through public collections at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library, Historical Society of Washington, Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Library, and the Library of Congress to gather material for his book, Ruble discovered an untapped wealth of DC based scholarship by graduate students and faculty of local universities. It would appear no stone is left unturned as Ruble cites sources as various as city life blog DCist to the New Deal era Federal Writers’ Project to the fiction of Edward P. Jones in his written opus to U Street’s past and present.
The Dupont Circle resident and long time city jazz patron’s genuine affection for U Street comes alive through the pages. The area’s creativity, which earned it the colloquialism “Black Broadway” in the early decades of the twentieth century, is thoroughly explored. Without jazz, the unique creation of African Americans, the book might not have been put together.
“The idea of U Street came to me after talking with the folks at Twins Jazz one night about how the neighborhood was changing,” admits Ruble. “The book took several years to write and seemed to become more important for me as U Street caught more and more attention. The street has become a symbol of profound changes in DC, which is one reason why I think this is the right moment for the book.”
Throughout the years U Street has remained a distinctive “contact zone” where people of all different walks of life, ethnicity, and class converge and interact to create a cultural experience not found anywhere else in the city, contends Ruble. His book is proof positive that the ongoing renaissance of U Street as a cultural “contact zone” and epicenter will be, in fact, soulless if the past is haphazardly forgotten and not celebrated. This important work, the first full history of the U Street neighborhood, shows that the area’s re-birth has just begun, again.
Washington’s U Street: A Biography is available at DC area chain and independent bookstores and online.
Photo of the Day_February 4, 2010
Taken in the summer of 2004 or 2005 from the now closed Cap City Records.
Credit: The Washington Syndicate
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